


Perfect

by Gehayi



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, La Belle au bois dormant | Sleeping Beauty - Charles Perrault, Sleeping Beauty (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Angst, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Fae & Fairies, Fairies, Fairy Godparents, Gen, Revisionist Fairy Tale, Spells & Enchantments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 19:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7401217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/pseuds/Gehayi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fairy godmothers' blessings have had a few unintended side effects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfect

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tanaqui](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanaqui/gifts).



By the time that she was fifteen, the princess hated her fairy godmothers. She knew--there was no way to _avoid_ knowing--that they had meant well. But she could not prevent herself from thinking that they should have found other gifts. A rattle, perhaps. Or a stuffed bunny.

For the fairies had been too intent on crafting her into the perfect woman without thinking that she really needed to be a baby and a little girl first. She had spent nearly her whole childhood locked in her room and covered in a funeral veil because one fairy had made her the most beautiful person in the world, even when she was lying in her cradle. It was disturbing how many people interpreted "beautiful" as desirable. Especially when the object of desire was an infant.

A second fairy godmother had "blessed" her with the intellect and understanding of an angel. The adults listening to this hadn't realized that fairies, who could say no word that was not true, did not use metaphors. Instantly, her mind had transformed from that of a baby who had barely discovered that she had feet and could fit them in her mouth to that of a celestial intelligence whose knowledge of the human world, the afterlife and God had nothing to do with the way that humans thought. That mind had been trapped in the body of a baby and then a toddler for what felt like millennia. 

Worse, she had never _learned_ anything. She'd never had to. All the knowledge of the world lay in her mind; she had danced perfectly since she had begun to walk; she sang flawlessly; and she could play every instrument on earth without the slightest error.

And yet none of it was _her_. She hadn't gained any of her knowledge of skills through effort. Underneath the enchantments that transformed her into everyone's notion of the perfect princess was an uneducated wretch who had no talents that hadn't been imposed on her by sorcery, a girl teetering on the brink of adulthood who had never been a true infant or a real child. And the wondrous fraud that she was _wasn't_ the girl she'd been intended to be.

She was, to put it bluntly, as cursed as any princess transformed into a flower, a frog or a fire-breathing dragon...but all anyone ever perceived was an ideal that they themselves yearned to be. No one ever saw that the gifts shackled her, that she had been serving a prison sentence ever she was born.

And as time ticked down toward her inevitable ensorcelled sleep and her equally inevitable awakening in an unimaginable future a hundred years hence, she wondered briefly if anyone ever would.


End file.
